Improving English conversation skills through online conversation lessons and classroom interactions with native speakers

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to improve the oral English performance of Thai lower-secondary students. It attempts to address the following questions: a) Can the employment of online conversation lessons help to improve learners' conversation skills compared to face-to-face classroom interactions with English speakers; b) Are there any differences in the performance improvements contributed to by the two learning approaches?; c)Which learning approach better improves the learners’ conversation performance?; and d) What are the strengths and weaknesses of each learning approach in developing conversation skills? The participants in this study were 50 Grade 8 students from Rajaprachanukroh Songkhla Province School in academic year 2014. They were purposively sampled and divided into two groups: on learning through online conversation lessons and the other via classroom interaction with an English speaker. They were individually interviewed to assess their oral English performance before the treatments and after completing the lessons. Students’ interviews and conversations practices were video-recorded for close analysis following Conversation Analysis (CA) principles and rated in the following features: fluency, vocabulary, appropriacy, pronunciation, and grammar. The research instruments employed in this study were oral communication tasks for pre- and post-tests. The research findings based on statistical and CA analysis shows that the students’ oral English performance considerably improved through the use of online lessons and classroom interaction with an English speaker. The learners engaged in classroom interaction, however, became significantly more fluent and had a wider range of vocabulary than those learning through online conversations, even though their performance in pronunciation were similar. Thus, it was recommended that teachers utilize online lessons not as the sole language learning activity but as a supplement to classroom interaction to strengthen particular speech features.